The Flyer

Source: Bethany College Art Department program showing a Sandzén painting over a Zona Wheeler painting.

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"Lydia's World" "In Swedish Lindsborg / At Swedish Bethany"2011

The newspaper article below this program containing the same text may be easier to read.

REVIEW of Lydia’s World exhibition on 3/31/11 byJohn Marshall, owner and editor (then) of the Lindsborg News Record in his column, "Valley Voice" article, printed on April 7, 2011.

A look behind the Art of ‘Lydia’s World’--

"The effect of a good painting, like a good paragraph, is to make something that was ground out seem as though it were dashed off. You think, “Oh, I could do that.” Until you realize that you can’t.

"One part of an eye-opening exhibit in downtown Lindsborg reveals the groundwork behind the painting of a Kansas landscape: photocopies of the notes and sketches of the late Lydia Sohlberg-Deere. For her, we learn, the whole image began with the parts, with making lines, noting colors and shadows, rock-by-rock, sprig and bush, the slant of a hill to tree and water, the sweep and hue of a pearl sky. Here we see the grinding work behind an image that seems so natural that it must have appeared with only a few sweeps of a brush.

"The Hidden Art and Photography of Lydia Sohlberg-Deereopened March 24 at the former Studio Lindsborg, 113 N. Main, and will run through Easter Sunday, April 24. A public reception will be from 4 – 7 PM. Sunday, April 3, at the gallery.

"The exhibit is the final public showing of the art of Sohlberg-Deere, who photographed much of life in Lindsborg and at Bethany College at the turn of the last century and into the early 1900s. Mrs. Sohlberg-Deere, who died in 1943, was a prolific photographer and a talented painter who studied at one time under the iconic Birger Sandzén. She was married to Prof. Emil O. Deere, a leader among early faculty and administrators at Bethany College.

"This vast show may require at least two visits – the first a scouting mission to consider the reach of 130 photographs and copies of paintings and the scope of their history; another, perhaps. is to take in the many diaries, sketch books and notes, the letters and cards among the Deeres, the Sohlbergs, the Sandzén’s, their families and friends (Three visits would be better.)

"Many of Lydia’s photographs have been exhibited in “Lydia’s World,” a periodic display in the windows of the Sundstrom Building at Main and Lincolns Streets in downtown Lindsborg. Mrs. Sohlberg-Deere’s great grand niece, Fran Cochran, organized those exhibits and this show. Cochran, of Menlo Park, Calif., is a 1968 graduate of Bethany College and has written numerous historical articles for the News-Records."

* * * Between 2005 and 2011 Lydia's photography exhibitions were on displayed at various venues in Lindsborg on Main Street including the Old Stuga, the Brick Street Gallery, the Swedish Pastries and Emporium, and the Sundstrom Building Sidewalk Window Gallery.

There was also an exhibition for the Bethany Home residence at their Bethany Home Hall Gallery.

The formal showing, as discussed above, was at the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in 2005 followed six years later in 2011 with its final showing, and only show of all 133 pieces, of Lydia's work at Studio 113 North Main.

(In 2012, the Lydia's World gallery of photographs were divided into smaller galleries and gifted to various Lindsborg organizations and institutions because there were no formal facilities available and/or able to accept it as a whole, or part of a whole. Thus, Lydia's work had once again gone into hiding; however, this is not at all an isolated event as there is so much art in Lindsborg, that most of it all is in hiding!!)

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* * *It is extremely important to note here,that in Lindsborg and at the Sandzénthere is an ongoing source of art exhibitions and the like going onand thatLydia's photography was only one of thousands of exhibitionsthrough the decades that has been shown inthis Swedish community "where agriculture and culture meet!"

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